finding her feet – faute de mieux

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Monthly Archives: August 2010

Last morning, having little to do at work I walked down to my favorite coffee shop in town. I picked a seat in a cosy corner of the café and settled down to a drink of delicious hot coffee. Sitting right there, I could watch human beings bustling about outside the glass doors of that blissfully quiet café. They were like tiny amorphous specks in the sea of life flowing endlessly on wheels on the city roads. The next thing I knew, I began to ponder over life- my life. A little here and a little there I digressed but every time I bounced back to it, for the rest of the day, even after I left the café, till I reached home, and after…
As I delved deeper into the realms of introspection, I became aware that besides all the day-to-day trivialities which make up the froth that one has to swim through mindlessly to go forward in time, I have a passion for something in my life, just one thing: writing. The thoughts followed thus…
I’m not a great writer, not even close to it. I enjoy writing nevertheless. It is true that certain passionate thoughts and emotions easily translate into weighty words but it happens to me exclusively when I’m caught in situations with no access to writing pads or any sort of recording instruments. And, when I make efforts to retain them in my mind they somehow seem to lose their fire as soon as I prepare to set them down at the end of a busy day. At such times, I
put the pen away, save the ink for another day, and pick a book to read. Maybe it is frustration caused by the emotionally unbalanced city lifestyle. Maybe it’s just my mood. Anyhow, the next time that it happens, I decided to do away with pens and papers, typewriters and electronic machines, and just sit and muse with eyes closed, instead of begrudging some author her magnificent book…
So there I sit with my eyes closed, to mould amorphous thoughts into feelings, to inject life into dormant and dead ideas, to tune up emotions, to direct emotions through the Writer’s Magic Loop and to see them come out of it as delectably flavored English words. Then, with my eyes closed, I string the words together, shuffle the strings around till they hit the right notes and reflect the right shades. When the words all fit into a perfect composition and I’m
certain that they are impressed upon my memory, that I can soon grab a pen and commit to paper, a sense of accomplishment emerges. As soon as my eyelids part to reveal the spark of eternal triumph in my eyes, the words in my mind inevitably dissolve in the deluge of light they are exposed to…the sense of triumph is crushed with the disappearance of the Magic Loop…and alas! I find myself left abandoned in my car, eyes wide open, caught in a traffic jam, raucous horns honking all around; and I look out of the side-window to see what appears as an amorphous vision of a boy sitting in the corner seat of a café, sipping his coffee, staring directly at a speck that is me and probably wondering about his own life…his own frustrations.